This transdisciplinary course teaches students the essential elements of a Value-based Engineering for sustainable IT system design. Value-based Engineering is an “Ethics-by-Design” methodology allowing companies to understand the social implications of their IT Innovations and to pin down the true human challenges arising from their IT design for direct as well as indirect stakeholders.

Value-based Engineering as taught in this course introduces students to formulate an ethically aligned value strategy for IT infrastructure. Concrete approaches for the identification of technical and organizational system design requirements are presented and applied in class in the form of many case-study exercises.

The goal of the course as a whole is to give students a first theoretical as well as practical grasp of what it would mean to become a 'value lead' for IT companies that want to build and market sustainable IT.  In this vein, the course sets the scene by teaching students first about the wider context of Value-based Engineering in today’s innovation management and requirements engineering landscape. Equally it provides them with an insight into moral philosophy and value theory as far as this is relevant for sustainable, ethical and legally compliant IT design.

The course is accompanied by the textbook "Value-based Engineering" https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110793383/html

- an insight into ethical, value-based technology innovation and system requirements analysis

- an understanding of human and social values and their ontology

- the skill to explore values with the help of moral philosophy and derive a proper value proposition for an IT system

- the know-how to translate value principles into IT design features

- some modeling tools to support value-based engineering

- enhancement of linguistic ability

This class requires full attendance.

This course is done in a flip-teaching mode. So students are coming to class in a prepared way: They need to watch the lecture upfront online and read text passages from the textbook. They pass a mini test on their presentation each week. They then work in their group to prepare a specific exercise. Each week one group needs to resume the weekly content and/or present their in-class group work. The course wraps up with an expose of a case study.

70% weekly mini quizes

10% group mini presentation of weekly content

10% group work in class

10% final summary expose prepared in group

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